Let there be light: adding lights to my 3D printers

Now that I have my 3D printers pretty well stable – well, for now – I’m having fun refining the machines.

With motorcycles, it’s called farkle, or any modification of your bike. In this case, the changes I made were a little more practical, but yeah, they look pretty cool, too ….

More often than I wish I’m up in the middle of the night, checking on a print. I’m not sure why it works out that way, but I’ll be low on filament or maybe just wake up and figure I’d better take a look.

(If I’m low on filament, I’m not sleeping well anyway – it’s sad to lose a print just because you didn’t plan well.)

I stumble out to the dining room, where my 8-foot-tall Cerberus 3D Gigante 3D printer is is, or the office where the Cerberus 3D 400 3D printer (right) is, and turn on the lights, squinting to focus.

Now, with my latest addition, I have a little help ….

The solution, it turns out, was simple and effective. I searched online for “led strip lights” and found some online. These things are terrific! I was able to run them inside the uprights and give them a rocker switch on the front of the 400 3D printer.

For the Gigante, I ran them up only 2 of the uprights – the back one faces the room and would just blind me when I turn them on.

That one has a round on / off switch that lets me control the brightness.

These are just simple additions, but I sure do enjoy the ability to control the lighting.

I’ve even used these lights under a cabinet in my garage that was otherwise too dark – I’ll have a video on my YouTube channel – where I have more than 500 videos – soon.

Farkle or not, this was one fun – and practical addition to my 3D printers.